Publisher's Synopsis
The Joyful Wisdom - La Gaya Scienza - The Gay Science by Friedrich Nietzsche Translated by Thomas Common With Poetry Rendered by Paul V. Cohn and Maude D. Petre The Gay Science or The Joyful Wisdom is a book by Friedrich Nietzsche, first published in 1882 and followed by a second edition, which was published after the completion of Thus Spoke Zarathustra and Beyond Good and Evil, in 1887. This substantial expansion includes a fifth book and an appendix of songs. It was noted by Nietzsche to be "the most personal of all [his] books", and contains the greatest number of poems in any of his published works. The book's title uses a phrase that was well known at the time. It was derived from a Provencal expression for the technical skill required for poetry-writing that had already been used by Ralph Waldo Emerson and E. S. Dallas and, in inverted form, by Thomas Carlyle in "the dismal science". The book's title was first translated into English as The Joyful Wisdom, but The Gay Science has become the common translation since Walter Kaufmann's version in the 1960s. Kaufmann cites The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (1955) that lists "The gay science (Provencal gai saber): the art of poetry".
